


periapsis

by rhodophoros



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 1,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27276247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhodophoros/pseuds/rhodophoros
Summary: He is raven-haired and raven-eyed and beautiful and when he flies it’s for the fun of it.Or, a collection of poetry.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Kudos: 6





	1. call & response

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this a while back but deleted it because I planned on revising it, but then season 8 happened...
> 
> But here it is, again, in its original form.

He is raven-haired and raven-eyed and beautiful and when he flies it’s for the fun of it.

You love him, not so much a fall but a plummet through the stripes of his atmosphere: exosphere; thermosphere; mesosphere; stratosphere; troposphere. The tips of your wings burn on entry.

He needs no help to fly; he is like a jet engine, constantly ejecting parts of himself to move forward, ever faster. You guide him, instead, give him wings and a way to sooth the burn that straddles his heart.

The cadet uniform hides his throat. When he’s in his black shirt, his neck is a long column of white, collarbones sharp at the base. You want to run your teeth down it.

One day he lets you.

  
He is grey-eyed and solid and you love him, and he leaves you all the same, riding a column of grey smoke into the upper atmosphere, saying he’ll come back.

He dies, or so they say.

Your wings snap off, you blow out, the heat in you fizzles out your skin and leaves behind a wreck. There’s nothing left for your blackened bones but to throw them into a desert fire and hope the sand and ashes lead you somewhere, somewhere.

You’ll believe anything, and there’s a hook in your heart you haven’t felt since he left, grey steel sharp through the muscle. It hurts, but it feels like he did, a little, something bright and warm shining through your ribs. It means the line is tight and pulling.

Turns out prophecies are real, sometimes.

Reentry burns him, but he makes it back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on Season 1 Episode 1: The Rise of Voltron


	2. son of daedalus

They say Icarus drowned because he flew too close to  
the sun,

so you flew in the opposite direction.

But you were never Icarus, were you?

It is his wings that melt in the desert heat,

his body that plummets from the sky. 

Thank god,

there is no ocean for him to drown in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith in the desert


	3. sound is vibration through air

The desert is a good place to scream.

When he first saw the words “pilot error” he’d thrown up, emptied his stomach through his throat, felt it burn on the way up like a rocket.

This time it’s his lungs, grief a liquid sound on the air, quivering like a mirage. False water shines on the dust; it offers no comfort.

He is not crying. He has already been emptied of all liquid. Like the desert he is a waste bound by mountains, finding ways to survive.

The note cracks, the scream ends.

He kneels as if to pray, a desert father seeking the Lord. No god answers him, but there is a sound in his head, the roar of rushing water, the drip of a broken tap, the break of the ocean. The current drags around his boots. It will take him where he needs to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith in the desert, again


	4. furnace

Under violet light you were broken,

by claw, by blade, by fire  
you were decimated, a tenth of your soul  
flayed, a tenth of you made strong, imperial, inhuman.

You escape, and he finds you.

Under violet eyes you are unmade:

with his hands, he unmakes you  
with his mouth, he unmakes you  
with his breath, he unmakes you

you are stone smashed to dust by his wind, his sea,  
molten by his fire, you harden  
brittle  
into clarity,  
desert glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in the beginning of season 1


	5. do androids have ptsd?

All a man is  
can be condensed  
into 10 to 100 terabytes.

His mind drips,  
violet  
into its capsule,  
taunting:

What would Takashi Shirogane be?

A set of piloting algorithms  
a voice emulator set to male, commanding  
hosted in a combat robot chassis.

He ejects the body.

He is found later, shuddering in his bunk  
under the man who shares his belly’s heat  
whose nails dig into his chest  
who swallows down what he has to give.

Keith knows who he is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during Season 1 Episode 9: Crystal Venom


	6. rhododactylos

In Homer, dawn is rose-fingered  
always bringing new day  
to doomed men on a sandy field,  
broken soldiers on rough seas  
returning from war.

She drew her light over you,  
that first and last day  
you kissed the Earth.  
You kissed him, too, and it felt like a first  
and a last.  
Even as you cradled his jaw in your hands  
(flesh and metal both)  
you knew you both were standing on  
a knife’s edge:  
it bit into your feet as you waited to fall into the black.

He is always there to catch you.

You are mortal—  
all heroes are.

Homer sang of men dead in the armor of their lovers,  
lovers standing like lionesses over their cubs.  
He will wear your armor after you die.

You tell him so  
at dusk, on the plains  
of another wasteland.

He doesn’t want to hear it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during Season 2 Episode 1: Across the Universe


	7. stardust boy

He is shaped from the desert dust  
given form by air breathed into lungs  
that press ribs out, against skin  
birdlike, outstretched to capture air and  
lift.

We are all dust, cosmic,  
wet clay from the corpses of stars  
ashes spread after a funeral.

He is hard, harder still  
in the crucible of war:  
the best porcelain is made from crushed bones.

He glitters under starlight,  
among his ancestors, beautiful  
like his dust is still  
alight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by Season 2 Episode 4: Greening the Cube


	8. trials, plural

He tastes blood in his mouth, iron and salt. He throws the knife to keep it. What does luxite taste of? he wonders.

An indirect method of escape. Classic.

He is visited by ghosts, present and past. No future: he never has had one.

He is left, again. That is routine. He leaves, which is not.

He is saved, by the love of a lion and a man. He gives, and for once the universe gives back.

He is bloody under his suit when he returns. Shiro cleans him, dresses him, kisses him. He’d missed a spot, a split lip.

It tastes like iron and salt, his blood, still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during Season 2 Episode 8: The Blade of Marmora


	9. affirmations

You find him, after.

His back is long and white and bruised, the suit half-off at his waist: he’s like a stamen rising from a black flower that someone’s crushed between their fingers.

He is beautiful, still, because of.

There is no time. You help him strip, help him back into his armor. He is mere embers now—he must be guarded.

The revelation does not go well.

Later, in the dimness of a bedroom, his eyes are dark and dull as charcoal, and they do not meet yours.

They always had, before.

You kiss his brow, a strange benediction. You are no holy man, but he has always thought you one. Like an ancient altar, he burns for it.

He burns beneath you, ashen but warm, and growing warmer. It is not so bad, to be a child of the stars.

It is what drew your orbits to meet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set after Season 2 Episode 8: Blade of Marmora, and inspired by chapter 2 of arahir's all you love, you keep


	10. beacon(less)

He dies, again.

You are a sailor of a dark sea,  
carried by cosmic waves.  
In the infinite there are as many stars as grains in a desert,  
more,  
but none are yours.

Can one drown, in a vacuum?

You want to, want to let your head slip under  
and your lungs exhale one final  
breath, but there’s a war on your back  
nations to seize back from dust:

last hope in the infinite.

You take his throne, feel the crown rest heavy,  
silver on your brow, tarnished where once  
it was gleaming.

The shade you lived in once is gone,  
it is like the desert, a white burning that blinds  
and digs into the bones of your forehead.

The Castle is more crowded than you have ever seen it,  
and you are more alone than you have ever felt.

But then your lion hears something  
in the black. 

  
He returns, again.

It is not the same.

The lighthouse is unmanned, the beacon unlit.  
You should be whole, but you feel like a compass needle  
bereft of magnetic north.

You nearly drown in the vacuum.

You remember: non-essential weight.

You return to your sea, a dark-clad sailor without moor,  
overboard and out of atmosphere.

It is lonely out in space.

This time, it was you who left.

He let you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during Season 3 and 4


	11. keith

Your name means forest.

Here you are, barely a man, and you feel as ancient as your name, as a cluster of trees.

His name means white and silver and noble, all things you never were, always in the shade at the edge of things, dark-haired and dark-eyed.

He is brilliant in your sky, and he takes you into his sphere and gives you light, warmth and with it, you gleam.

You think he’s your barycenter, your light just a mirror of his, and when he leaves, dies, you wink out, broken. Seven years bad luck.

You’re left with silver stars on a black field and the clarity of the desert, but sand is no place to set down roots.

Boy, you’ve never been a satellite; when he returns it is as one of a binary system returned to periapsis. You feel each other’s warmth.

You go together, this time, beyond the atmosphere.  
The horizon curls into a circle, not an exit but a return to your mother’s country, white stars on a black field.

It is always the story of a forest to rise, ever upward.


End file.
